
♦ 

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I Place and Importance f 



f, OF THE f 

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I Common School I 

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*♦* An Address by ♦> 

f JAMES W. LEE, | 

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♦ Pastor Park Street M. E. Church South, Atlanta, Ga., before f 
A the County School Officials' Association, ▲ 

♦ Athens, Ga., May 4th, 1910. ♦ 

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»♦♦ Published by ♦;► 

^ The Georgia County School Officials A 

♦> Association. ♦»♦ 

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D. Of 0- 
JUL 5 '»'° 



PLACE AND IMPORTANCE OF THE COMMON 
SCHOOL. 



An address before the Convention of County School 

Commissioners, Delivered in Athens, Georgia, 

Wednesday Evening, May 4th, 19 10, 

by James W. Lee. 



I do not propose to treat the common school as the 
narrow restricted institution it was seemingly thought to 
be by those who framed the present Constitution of the 
State. To represent the little Georgia establishment as 
a common school, is like calling a three-horse-power elec- 
tric motor a Corliss engine. The common school pro- 
vided for the education of the rising generation by the 
people of this commonwealth would take up about as 
much room in one demanded by the age in which we live, 
as a wheel barrow would in a cathedral. An adequate 
common school can not be enclosed by a triangular fence, 
the three sides of which are called respectively, Reading, 
Riting and Rithmetic. A young lady is represented as 
making a visit once to the Nigaara Falls. She was 
greatly impressed by the wild downpour of water. After 
straining her mind to the utmost limits of her vocabulary, 
in order to do justice to the sublime situation, she pro- 
nounced it "cute." There is about as much space inside 
the word "cute" to hold the meaning of the Niagara Falls, 
as there is in the Constitution of Georgia to hold such a 
system of public education as the times require. I 
shall fherefore treat the common school as standing for 
the whole system of public education necessary for one 
generation to hand down its learning to another. 



In his beautiful story, "The Bluebird," Maeterlink 
gives the experience of two children, Tyltyl and Mytyl, 
who went forth hand in hand to search for the bluebird. 
A fairy, named Berylune, gave Tyltyl a little green cap 
with a big diamond in the cockade of it, so that he might 
be able to see. For it was said that ordinary mortals can- 
not really see. If they could they would see beauty 
everywhere and know that all stones are precious stones. 
By means of the big diamond in the cockade of his cap, 
Tyltyl had only to look in any particular direction to see 
all that was in front of him. He could see into the inside 
of things, into the soul of sugar and milk and bread and 
into the interior meaning of the seconds ticked off by the 
clock. Thus equipped, and with Light for a guide, the 
children set out in quest of the bluebird, intended by Mae- 
terlink to typify Happiness, They visited the past, hoping 
to find the bluebird among the tombs, but they found 
only the flowers blooming where the d-ead had been. 
They then sought the bluebird in the future, but instead, 
they found a vast, vaulted, azure palace, almost illimita- 
ble in extent. In this wondrous place they saw, as far as 
the eye could reach, groups of chattering, romping, sing- 
ing children, awaiting, so Light told Tyltyl, the hour of 
their birth. When fathers and mothers on earth asked 
for children, the great doors at the end of the blue vault 
were thrown open, and the little ones went down accord- 
ing to their turn. Meanwhile, each unborn child was 
preparing the gift he was to bring to the world. One 
was inventing a happiness machine, another three and 
thirty remedies for prolonging life; a third, the where- 
withal to find the treasure hid in the moon. Then there 
were others who had discovered secrets for growing dai- 
sies as large as cart wheels, and grapes as large as pears. 



One little fellow was trying to bring pure joy to the 
earth. A tiny pinch of human potentiality was devising 
a method for effacing injustice from the world, while a 
red-headed promise of a future man was coming to the 
earth to conquer death. Every dhild, before he could em- 
bark on Time's galley for the shores of the earth was re- 
quired to have some idea or invention with which to bless 
the world. The children failed to find the bluebird in 
their travels. But when Tyltyl and Mytyl woke up in 
their bed, the morning after their dream wanderings, lo 
and behold ! the bird in the cage in their rooms had turned 
blue during the night. The thing they sought was not 
distant from them, but in sight of their very eyes. 

II. 

The lesson of Maeterlink's fancy, everyone can find for 
himself. The people of the South need diamonds in the 
cockade of their caps, in order to bring the future before 
their eyes, and they need to learn the lesson Tyltyl and 
Mytyl discovered, that everything necessary to equip 
them to become rich and great and happy is found within 
the precincts of their own radiant section, and in the 
depths of their own pulsing lives. The South is supposed 
to have a population of 28,000,000. The average age of 
life in this section is forty years. Seven hundred thous- 
and unborn children, then, will leave eternity for South- 
ern shores in the next twelve months, and sixty-two 
thousand five hundred of these children will land within 
the confines of Georgia. Not elsewhere on the planet's 
whoie face could 700,000 little emigrants from Eternity 
find as fair a place in which to spend a few fleeting years 
as in the Southern section of the United States. There 
is nothing in the sun, or t,he moon, in Neptune or in Mars 
that we cannot duplicate in the South. Nothing ever 



grew in any soil of Egypt, or Babylon, or Greece or 
Rome, that we cannot produce in the South. We have 
here in the raw material of our Anglo-Saxon humanity a& 
fine stuff out of which to make men and women as ever 
took form in the sons and daughters of any country under 
the stars. It is not necessary to seek in Italy where the 
Savanarolas grew, or in England where the Gladstones 
grew, or in France where the Pasteurs grew for any more 
promising forms of young life than are now breathing in 
tTie arms of Southern mothers. As 700,000 children are 
born in the Southern States every year, and taking the 
school age to be from six to twenty, we may say that 
9,800,000 human beings are being trained, for the stupen- 
dous responsibilities of life, in our schools every fourteen 
years. 

III. 

The universe has been called a factory of worlds. But 
worlds are unconscious material things. They go as they 
are driven, and act as they are forced. In order to get a 
correct idea of the place and importance of the common 
school, it is necessary to think of it as the institution in 
which diminutive worlds of rational life are trained to 
think, and feel and act, not as they are driven or forced 
from without, but as they are taught to initiate feeling and 
act from within, on their own acount. Turning fire mist 
into dough, and cutting it into planets, as a woman 
manipulates batter and wheels it into pancakes, is a dis- 
tinguished and enormous business, but this does not com- 
pare in dignity with the infinitely delicate work of the 
common school, w'hich, as a loom, takes the separate 
strands of individual life as so much warp, and uses 
Science, Art, Literature and Institution, as so much woof, 
and out of warp and woof weaves the fabric of orderly,- 



beautiful, civilized life. Between the crude material of 
the field and raiment, ready for use, stands the cotton 
mill. Between the trees of the forests and the shelter 
over people's heads stands the saw mill. Between the 
grain growing out of the ground and bread for the table 
stands the corn mill. Between the ore in the mountain and 
the wheel work of commerce stands the iron mill. These 
are the institutions which stand to convert the crude facts 
of nature into forms available for the uses of practical 
life. But the greatest factory ever built on earth is the 
common school, the institution in which crwde mind is 
trained to think truth, unregulated volition disciplined to 
will law, and chaotic emotion taught to love the good. 

IV. 

The common school stands between the learning of all 
past generations, and the minds of the rising generation 
that shall use that learning in the conduct and work of 
the future. The common school is the port of entry into 
which is dumped the intellectual merchandise of all by- 
gone times, to be reloaded on the mental ships getting 
ready to sail toward the shores of coming ages. Tear 
down these ports of entry all round the world, and keep 
them down for one generation, let nothing come in and 
nothing go out for forty years, and the human race drops 
from civilization to savagery. Common schools are the 
rounds of the ascending ladder up which man is climbing 
to higher and hig'her levels of conquest and achievement. 
He is not climbing through steam cars. Their efficiency 
and numbers are increased through the work of the com- 
mon school. He is not going up by means of foundries 
and factories, and banks and telegraph systems ; all these 
are securing their equipment and advancing values 
through the activity of the common school. When a 



people add to the efficiency of the common school, they 
increase the number of their bridges ; they add grains to 
the ears of their corn ; they put new stories on top of 
their sky-scrapers; they erect more amply furnished 
homes ; they add a new magnitude to their sweep of the 
heavens ; they find a new layer to their knowledge of the 
earth's strata ; they pile more salt petre on the heap of 
their plant food ; and they crowd with fresh notes the mel- 
ody of their music. When support is held back from 
the common school, the horizon of the future is narrowed,^ 
and the real estate of the future is decreased in value. 
When underpinning is kept from beneath the common 
school, the stability of the courts is undermined, and the 
way is prepared for mobs and lynching. When the com- 
mon school is starved and cramped the children are sent 
hobbling on crutches into the years to come. 

V. 

There is a class of men in our legislative assemblies 
who accept it as part of their duty to keep the balance 
between the State's expenditure and its income. They 
are useful public servants, in so far as they mse their vote 
and voice to oppose needless extravagance. They are 
sometimes known as the *'watch-dogs" of the Treasury. 
As the self appointed guardians of the people's money, 
the habit of barking and showing their teeth is often salu- 
tary. But fhe habit of springing at every one who ap- 
proaches the Treasury Department should not be prac- 
ticed indiscriminately. When demands are made upon 
public funds for the support of education, the so-called 
economizers should keep silent. In a great common- 
wealth, the common school should have the right of way 
over all other institutions that stand for the public good. 
Constitutional tax limits even, should get off the track, 



wlien the common school train comes thundering down 
the road, loaded with the children of the next generation. 
If enough is not coming in from taxation, to keep up the 
equipment and speed of the common school train, taxes 
should be increased. Increasing taxes for the common 
school is like increasing assessments on themselves by a 
company of gentlemen engaged in the completion of a 
great financial enterprise. They know when their estab- 
lishment is finished and set to work, that they will be 
more than amply repaid for what their plant cost them. 
For every dollar the tax payer takes out of his pocket for 
t/he support of the common school to-day, his children 
will put a thousand each back into their pockets to-mor- 
row. 

VI. 

The Prince of Orange, in 1678, cut the dykes of Hol- 
land, in order that he might secure the help of the sea in 
floating his ships to Leyden, so as to relieve the siege and 
drive away the Spaniards. He was so impressed with 
the patriotism and devotion of the citizens who had been 
holding out against the invaders, though forced to live on 
rats, and cats and dogs, and who had resolved to starve 
rather than surrender, that he offered them one of two 
benefits — to exempt them from taxation, or to build them 
a university. In their poverty, verging on starvation, 
they took the university. No wonder that upon such 
human soil, Rembrandts and Potters, besides great schol- 
ars and thinkers, grew, who have been the wonder of the 
world in modern times. Taxation to the point of hard 
and plain living, did not appear to the Dutch a price too 
high to pay for an institution of learning. Emphasizing 
the value of knowledge, they found great men coming up 
out of their national life to bless their people and the 
world. They found the best way to keep the seas back 



from the land was first to build dykes in the minds of 
their children to keep out ignorance. They manufactured 
ships of trade to sail on all the seas of commerce in the 
class rooms of their centers of learning. Down on the 
flat ground, fifteen feet below the water level, their boys 
and girls were taught to arrest the fury of the sea. In- 
vesting their money in the minds of their children, they 
laid fhe foundations of great wealth, and prepared the 
way for a splendid masterful people. Without an army, 
without battleships, they positively hold their place, as a 
magnificent force in the world's affairs, by the use of their 
intellects. 

VII. 

The common school is the intellectual clearing house in 
wTiich the balance is kept by the present, between the 
past and future, — where the exchange of debts is 
made between those who have lived and those who are t© 
live. The past and the present are under obligations to 
turn over all their possessions into keeping of the future. 
The mental property of mankind has been slowly ac- 
cumulated and handed down from one generation to an- 
other. Those in charge of affairs to-day received the 
principal of their intellectual fortune from their fathers. 
To this they have added tlie increment won through their 
inventions, discoveries and enterprises. But they owe, 
all, principal and interest, to the young life coming out 
from the unseen to people the globe in the next genera- 
tion. The common school is a place of exchange in which 
t'he obligations are met, due by the age that is going to 
the age that is coming, Wiien the intellectual fortunes of 
a people are made over to the rising generation, they have 
about paid everything of real value in their possession. 
Lands and goods and chattels are well enough in their 

10 



way, but if these are bequeathed, unaccompanied by men- 
tal wealth, then the inheritors are left paupers on the only 
side of themselves of eternal value. The generation of 
young Greeks to whom the vast fortunes of Socrates, 
Plato and Aristotle were left, were the richest people in- 
tellectually who ever lived. Had all the ideas of the three 
great thinkers been converted into enough money to make 
every Greek 300 B. C, a billionaire, had every solitary 
child of the period been willed enough coin to buy for 
himself a continent, but had he been left without ideas, 
then, I say, the generation that succeeded the philosopTi- 
ical masters would have contributed no more toward ad- 
vancing the fortunes of mankind then if they had been 
so many squirrels with twenty billion thousand hickory 
nuts eacTi piled by his side. 

VIII. 

The value of all the property in the South, according 
to Mr. Richard H. Edmunds, is at present $21,000,000,000.^ 
Hand down this wealth entire to the rising generation, 
without proper mental and moral training, and it will 
prove a curse instead of a blessing. Were the Southern 
people to invest $280,000,000 annually in the minds of 
their sons and daug'hters (this would be only $10.00 per 
capita of the 28,000,000 of the population) they would still 
have left $20,720,000,000 to go into their pockets. By 
so much as you store up cash in the minds of the boys and 
girls, iby so much do you increase the value of that left 
for t?heir bank account. One dollar in the pocket of an ed- 
ucated man is worth more to him, than a thousand in the 
pocket of an ignorant man, is worth to him. Ignorance 
multiplied by a million dollars does not come to as muck 
as intelligence multiplied by thirty cents. A mere fee 

11 



simple exclusive title to property does not give one the 
ownership of it in a high sense, any more fhan the exclu- 
sive deed to a fortune a crank in London once 
willed to a flock of pigeons, gave the birds the real 
ownership of it. The nature of a pigeon is not wide and 
deep and high enougTi to own much of property. All that 
such a bird can get out of money is what he can peck out of 
the grains into which it may be turned. All that an uned- 
ucjfted man can get out of wealth is what he csn eat and 
wear, and use for shelter out of it. The barbarian did as 
mucli for hims'elf when the ground was a wilderness and 
not a gard«a. An exclusive title to a master piece of 
painting, like Rembrandt's "Nightwatch," does not put a 
person, who is not trained to see' in possession of it. To 
the poor artist, who carries rights to beauty developed in 
his soul, fhe picture belongs by all the fingers of light that 
pull its splendor to his eyes, while to the undisciplined ig- 
noramus, who paid a million for it, it belongs only by the 
legal privilege which permits him to hang it in his house 
as so many square feet of canvas to light up walls wliich 
would otherwise be bare. William E. Gladstone had in 
his life time 35,000 volumes in his library. He had a ti- 
tle to the books as exclusive as that of the pigeons to the 
fortune left them in London. But over and above the ex- 
ternal fee-simple right to his library, he had the interior 
mental culture to appreciate its contents. He could not 
only take down the books from the shelves with his hands 
as a pigeon picks up wheat with its bill, but he could 
pack away all their wondrous meaning into his capacious 
soul. He ®wned his books, like Moses owned the chosen 
people, like Homer owned Greece, like Dante owned the 
Middle Ages, like Copernicus owned the skies, and like 
Beethoven owned music, by the cultivated intelligence 
and sympathy which comprehend them. 



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IX. 

The best way for parents to leave money to their chil- 
dren is to lock it in the minds of tlie little ones while they 
are growing up. After that no thieves can steal it, no 
moth corrupt it. According to the educational program 
the Southern people are following to-day, they will leave 
375 times more money to go into the pockets of their chil- 
dren than they are storing up in their intellects. This is 
too great a disproportion between what is to be piled 
around theim after their parents have passed away, and 
what was packed away in their souls while the old folks 
were alive. It is important to keep the wheels in the mills 
and tlie shops of the future turning, but these should not 
be furnished with force to make more revolutions than 
the machinery God built in the heads of those who shall 
own them. $21,000,000,000 in the form of tangible prop- 
erty, and $56,000,000 annually in the form of mental 
equipment will unbalance the Southern men and women 
of to-morrow. They will have more material weights 
to pull them down, than mental elevators to lift them 
up. According to the sttaement of Mr. Richard H. Ed- 
munds, published a few days ago in the Constitution, the 
South is yielding annually : 

$2,675,000,000 from its factories; 

$2,550,000,000 from its farms; 

$400,000,000 from its forests 

$300,000,000 from its mines ; 

$1,000,000,000 from its cotton and cotton seed; 

$700,000,000 from its grain; 

$180,000,000 from its live stock; 

$175,000,000 from its dairy products ; 

$170,000,000 from its poultry products; 

$150,000,000 from its fruits and vegetables; 

$75,000,000 from its tobacco; 

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$50,000,000 from its sugar products; 

$650,000,000 from exports; 

20,000,000,000 feet of lumber; 

1,250,000,000 lbs. of cotton goods; 

90,000,000 tons of coal; 

30,000,000 bbls. of petroleum; 

8,500,000 tons of coke ; 

6,000,000 tons of iron ore. 

3,500,000 tons of pig iron; 

2,375,000,000 tons of phosphate rock; 

and 350,000 tons of sulphur. 

As a basis of future operations, the South has 806,647 
square miles of land area; 232,400,000 acres of wooded 
area; 16,000 miles of navigable inland waterways; 2,500 
miles of coast line ; 70,000 miles of railroad ; 365 separate 
kinds of industries; 11,000,000 spindles; 350,000 looms; 
845 cotton mills ; 930 cotton seed oil mills ; 125 blast fur- 
naces ; 15,250 lumber mills; 50 leading minerals; 490,000- 
000,000 tons of coal; 10,000,000,000 tons of iron ore; 
5,000,000 horse power in streams; 1,000,000 hydro-elec- 
tric power; 350,000,000 acres of farm lands; 35,- 
000,000 head of live stock ; $2,110,000,000 invested in man- 
ufacturing; $1,400,000,000 of bank deposits; $21,000,- 
000,000 worth of property. 

According to Mr. Edmunds, if the South advances at 
the same rate of increase for the next twenty-five years 
maintained between 1900 and 1909, we will have in 1935 
$6,963,000,000 instead of $2,111,000,000 invested in manu- 
facturers, and will be receiving an annual income from 
them of $8,447,000,000, insead of $2,675,000,000. We 
will have invested $1,439,705,000 in cotton mills, instead of 
$281,375,000, and 46,816,000 spindles in action, instead 
of 10,650,000, and will be using 3,886,000,000 pounds of 
cotton, instead of 1,236,000,000 as we do now. We will 
have 3,710 cotton oil mills, instead if 830, and we will 



14 



have invested in them $571,000,000, instead of $96,000,000. 
Our lumber products will bring $1,457,000,000, instead of 
$380,000,000. Our farm products will amount to $7,631 
000,000, instead of $2,550,000,000. We will be raising 
30,000,000 bales of cotton, instead of 12,000,000, the value 
of which without the seed will be $2,275,000,000, instead 
of $647,000,000. We will be raising nearly 2,000,000,000 
bushels of corn instead of 735,000,000. We will be min- 
ing $1,158,000,000 worth of mineral products, instead of 
$258,000,000 worth. We will have 127,000 railway mile- 
age, instead of 69,000, and exports to the value of $1,097,- 
000,000, instead of $619,000,000 and property worth $63,- 
000,000,000, instead of $21,000,000,000. 

X. 

Here is enough money, if every mill of it was turned 
into a barrel of water to make a river like the Mississippi. 
Here is enough wealth, if every cent of it was converted 
into a square block of stone to build a pyramid as large 
as that of Cheops upon every square mile of land on the 
globe. According to Mr. Edmunds, the assessed value of 
the property in the South is now $9,560,000,000, but the ac- 
tual value according to him is $21,000,000,000. The as- 
sessed value in 1935, he says, will be $31,000,000,000. If 
the distance betwen the assessed value and the actual 
value of Southern property is maintained for twenty-five 
years, then, in 1935, the property of the South will be 
worth more than $60,000,000,000. The population then, 
according to Mr. Edmunds will be 40,000,000. Now, the 
proposition with which the Southern people are face to 
face is this — how are they to prepare the coming 40,000,- 
000 of people to own and use wisely $60,000,000,000 
worth of property. If the children are sent forth from 
the homes mentally and spiritually halt, then they will 
own it mainly by their lower, instead of their higher na- 

1€ S 



ture. By what side of themselves will 40,cxx),ooo South- 
em men and women twenty-five years from now own 
$60,000,000,000 of property ? If they own it by the merely 
selfish desire of gain, as Croesus, the richest man in an- 
cient times owned his, they will use it to bury them- 
selves beneath a grave no travelers of coming ages wiH 
ever care to visit. If they possess it by the side of them- 
selves Polycarp exercised in owning his pittance, they 
will use it to build character no fire can burn. If like 
Nero, they own it by their appetites, they will use it to 
disgrace their age as he did to blacken his. If they own 
it by their conscience as Saint Paul possessed the little 
he made by building tents, they will use it in enlarging the 
issue of a new edition of humanity to people coming ages. 
If they own it by their good will to mankind as John 
Stuart Kennedy owned his, they will use it for the good 
of the human race. If they possess it by their greed 
as the Pittsburg grafters do theirs, then they will use it 
to debauch Legislatures, and to make of their names a 
synonym for infamy. If they own it as Madame Currier 
did hers, they will use it to find the force hidden in some 
of the other elements as she did to discover that of ra- 
dium. At just what level of their natures the Southern 
people shall own their vast fortunes twenty-five years 
from now is a stupendous question. The home and the 
Church will be called upon to play a tremendous part in 
the solution of this problem. But the common school, 
because of its relation to the growing susceptible life of 
the young, is important beyond tfhe power of words to de- 
scribe. The children are in church two hours a week 
and in the home a few hours of each day for play and 
sleep; but for fourteen years, they are housed in t^e 
school during the very heart of the days. 

XI. 
At $1.49 per capita, the people of Georgia are investing 

16 



five times as much money in automobiles to-day as the 
State pays out for the support of the common school. 
The 8,500 automobiles in the State, at an average of 
$2,500 each cost $21,250,000. The life of each machine is 
only about five years. To keep the automobiles repaired 
and in running order while they do live costs about $3, 
500,000. That is, leaving out of sight the $21,500,000 the 
machines originally cost, it actually takes more to run 
them than is now being spent for the support of the com- 
mon school. The decision the citizens of Leyden 
were called upon by the Prince of Orange to make, was 
not between luxuries and a university, but almost be- 
tween bread and a university, and they took the univer- 
sity. Wlhat is to be the future of a State that spends more 
than $21,000,000 a year for one single item of luxury the 
people can get along without, and only $3,500,000 for 
an institution upon which their very existence as an en- 
lightened community depends? Will one be doing very 
great violence to the facts of such a situation if he infers 
from them that such a population will breathe for a 
thousand years without being able to number one single 
Rembrandt, or Paulus Potter, or Boerhave, or Spinoza, 
or Erasmus or Arminius among its citizens. Nothing 
is further from my purpose than to make the impression 
that I am opposed to automobiles. They are beautiful 
and splendid monsters of speed, and a fresh indication of 
man's conquest of time and space. What I want to 
know, however, is what lasting good can come to a peo- 
ple by furnishing their bodies with means to fly, unless 
at the same time they equip their minds to keep from 
trudging on the ground. There is no objection to travel- 
ing at the rate of sixty miles an hour over the big roads 
with the part of ourselves that can be weighed on the 
scales, if at the same time wings are furnished to that 
part of ourselves capable of weighing the sun and of bot- 

17 



tling the gay streamers of Halley's comet. Whirling 
through the air like an eagle with the bottom of ourselves 
and crawling on the ground like a snail with the top, is not 
the sort of all round action that gets anywhere a high 
minded people should care to reach. The machinery that 
needs to be set to revolving like lightning to-day in Geor- 
gia, is not mainly the sort that wheels sleepy Rip Van 
Winkles from one city to another, but the kind the Lord 
built in the heads of liuman beings to grind out ideas. 
Teach the children to use their interior powers of mind, 
and they can fly, without leaving home, on the wings 
of the morning to tlie uttermost parts of the earth, or of 
the universe. It does not mean much more to wheel 
150 pounds of animated, ignorant, human dust, in three 
hours, from Atlanta to Savannah, than it does to shoot, 
in three minutes, a stick of wood two hundred miles from 
the center of a circling cyclone. The climbing of Vesu- 
vius by Humbolt one single day meant more to the human 
race fhan did the ascent and descent of that perilous heap 
of fire and ashes by the ignorant natives for a thousand 
years. 

XII. 

Wlien the common school is regarded as fhe intellec- 
tual clearing house in which the debts of past generations 
are paid to those who are to live in the future, it is evi- 
dent that as an institution, its importance and significance 
have grown with every passing age. The functions of a 
common school, had there been such an establisTiment 
two hundred years after Adam and Eve were set up to 
housekeeping on the earth, would have been quite simple 
and easily performed. All the knowledge and experience 
of the human race accumulated in the first two centuries 
of its existence could have been concentrated into one of 



18 



our second readers. The task of the common school 
teacher in the years 3,800 B. C, if we accept Axch-Bishop 
Usher's chronological table as correct, could have been 
discharged in fourteen weeks, instead of fourteen years. 
It is understood that the common school, as we know it 
to-day, is a modern institution, but there must have been 
some sort of an establishment, in each age, clear back to 
the beginning for handing down learning to the young. 
This organization, without reference to the period in 
which it did its work, for convenience sake, I am calling 
the common school. The common school in Rome in the 
time of Augustus Caesar had much to teadi the children 
of the Imperial City. The Hebrew, Greek and Latin lan- 
guages had been developed. Much of the most 
important history of all the ages had been made. So that 
the common school at the time of Augustus was a vastly 
larger and more complex institution than was the com- 
mon school two hundred years after our first parents got 
out of the garden to make their way in this stormy world. 
Our knowledge of science gives to the common school 
of the present time a place of importance such as it never 
occupied before. Within fifty years, more has been 
learned about the structure, constituent elements, and 
natural history of the earth than the whole human race 
found out during all the thousands of years of its history 
prior to that time. The so-called science taught two hun- 
dred and fifty years ago is now regarded as absurd and 
ridiculous. Sir Thomas Browne published his work en- 
titled ''Enquiries Into Very Many Recent Tenets and 
Commonly Presumed Truths," a little more than two 
hundred and fifty years ago. It was taught then that the 
king fisher hanging by the bill managed to show in what 
quarter the wind was blowing, by an occult and secret 
property, converting the breast of the bird to that part of 
the horizon whence the wind did blow. The diamond, 

19 



he said, was regarded as the hardest of stones, not yield- 
ing to emery or any thing except its own dust, could yet 
be made soft and broken by the blood of a goat. That 
there is a property in the basil plant to propagate scor- 
pions, and that by the scent of the plant they were bred 
in the human brain. He said that it was tatvght that the 
elephant had no joints therefore being unable t© lie down, 
he slept against a tree, whic'h the hunter observing some- 
time cut almost asunder, whereon the beast relying, by 
the fall of the tree, fell itself, and was unable to rise any 
more. 

XIII. 

As long as fhe science taught in the common school 
was like that accepted two hundred and fifty years ago, 
it served to conduct the minds of the young away from 
the truth of nature, rather than to put them in right re- 
lation with it. Wrong knowledge of the material universe 
held in the human mind up to within recent years actu- 
ally kept the teeming millions of God's children out of 
possession of the vast estate Hie had provided for them. 
The new knowledge of the nature of things, students of 
science have made available, has added, in an unparalelled 
degree, to the value of the common school. Science has 
not only put us in correspondence with the real order 
and uses of natural facts, but it has made necessary the 
reorganization of all our knowledge. It has not only put 
out of business the old so-called learning about the earth 
with its matter and force, but it has made necessary a 
changed attitude of the human mind toward all its in- 
tellectual fortunes. All knowledge is now taught from 
a new point of view. No truth of nature or man or God 
that ever was has been destroyed ; but man comes to the 
study of all truth to-day with the scientific method. 



20 



This does not create any new truth, but gives man the 
secret of getting hold of all truth in a way to make it 
serve him as never before. The revolution in thinking 
that has slowly taken place during the past fifty years 
has put man into a new universe. All his intellectual 
possessions have been made over. He has nothing essen- 
tially now that he did not have a hundred years ago. 
But he has a new intellectual grip on all things. He 
owns the stars, the sky, the ether, the atmosphere, the 
mountains, the rivers and the seas with a new title. 
Hence the common school, through which this won- 
drous estate of mental wealth is to be passed down to 
coming times, has assumed a position oi dignity a.id 
significance it never had before, 

XIV. 

Man never depended upon knowledge so completely 
for his very existence on earth as he does to-day. Be- 
cause knowledge now is in line with the facts, and there- 
fore becomes necessary in order to enable man to bring 
the force of facts into his service. He has learned to 
make carwheels and napkins out of paper, to build pave- 
ments out of glass, to convert old shoes into railway ties, 
to take food for his corn out of the nitrogen of the air, 
to wind up his operas on spools, to use the ether to 
talk through, and to find enough force in a teaspoonful 
of salt to drive his Mauretanias across the sea. He has 
found the solar system duplicated inside every atom of 
matter, and that a gramme's weight of these interior 
corpuscles contains energy equal to 8o,ooo,ocx),ooo horse- 
power per second. He has learned that one copper cent 
contains enough energy, if it could be released, to drive a 
freight train four and a half times around the circumfer- 
ence of the globe. He knows how to convert the brilliant 

21 



streamers of the northern lights into strawberries, and 
thus become able to swallow down saucerfuls of the Au- 
rora Borealis for breakfast. He can turn electricity into 
wheat, and see in his biscuits so many flashes of light- 
ning going into blood and muscle in his body, rather than 
into the claps of thunder in t'he sky. 

XV. 

As long as the world was regarded as a vast plain, 
resting quietiy in space down here beneath the constella- 
tions, man could manage t oeke out his poky existence 
without much knowledge of his earthly abode. But 
now. When the globe is known to be a vast round sea of 
seething electricity, when the eighty original elements 
are known to be, in the last analysis, but varying combi- 
nations of positve and negative lightning, man must ac- 
quaint himself with this new world in order to live de- 
cently on it at all. Things are not hard because they are 
rigid, but they seem to be rigid because made up of soft 
little points going at an unimaginable rate of speed. 

Paderewski found it necessary to spend years and 
years in the most painstaking study in order to learn 
how to manipulate as simple an instrument as the piano. 
Sir Joseph J. Thompson has calculated that an inch 
square box if closely packed can hold two million tril- 
lion of molecules, which are so light that it takes a thous- 
and trillion of them to affect the most delicates scales. 
These molecules can then be divided again into millions 
and billions of atoms, and each of these atoms "has for it- 
self an inside content made up from one thousand to 
two "hundred thousand corpuscles, and each corpuscle re- 
volves around a central point inside the atom as the earth 
and other planets of the solar system circulate about the 
sun. Thus, every one of the eigfhty forms of so-called 



22 



matter already discovered, when analyzed and traced to 
its ultimate constituent elements, is found to be so many 
corpuscles or units of positive and negative electricity. 
And this eletctricity, we are now told, is but a strained 
form of ether, as a bubble is of water on the surface of 
a tub of soapsuds. The original substance the Creator 
uses by means of which to express his thoughts in the 
form of a universe, is the ether. When the ether under 
the direction of eternal intelligence lifts itself up into 
those diminutive bubbles called positive and negative 
units of electricity, they combine in various proportions, 
and finally get themselves named in our chemistries as 
gold, oxygen, iron, hydrogen, radium, etc., on to the end 
of the list of about eighty different forms of matter. 
When we think of the earth as a point in which the uni- 
verse duplicates itself, and that this repetition of itself is 
continued on and on down to each corpuscle that re- 
volves in each atom of each form of matter, and thus 
see that the sum of things has eighty tracks down which 
to fall in smaller and smaller forms, from the infinitely 
great to the infinitesimally little, we are positively over- 
whelmed with unspeakable amazement at the marvelous 
sublimity and wonder of it all. It is of course impossi- 
ble therefore for one man ever to manrpulate the earth as 
Paderewski does the piano. But the whole human race, 
working as one man, in multitudinous ways, is gradually 
learning to play on this instrument. The general and 
practical knowledge of all men is made over in the com- 
mon school to each individual, and this becomes the 
foundation for the special training each can follow ac- 
cording to his bent in the universities, established for 
technical instruction along particular lines of study and 
work. 



SZ 



XVI. 

Someone will ask how the scientists know that each 
atom of matter contains within its interior sphere cor- 
puscles revolving at an unthinkable rate around a central 
point. In reply, it may be answered that they know it 
just as they know it would be impossible for a cannon 
ball to pick itself up from the sidewalk and hit the moon 
in twenty seconds unless it were forced by some power 
to move with such speed from the ground to the moon. 
When corpuscles fly out from an atom of radium and 
show persistent energy sufficient to keep a bell ringing 
for hundreds of years every one who thinks is 
obliged to infer that they are flying round inside the atom 
at a great rate of speed before they get ou.t from within 
to make the bell ring on the outside. It is only a case of 
the conversion of energy moving round the circle into 
energy moving along a straight line. Had there been no 
circular energy to begin with, there would have been no 
tangential energy to ring the bell with. Then, again, 
someone will be ready to ask what all this minute knowl- 
edge about corpuscles, etc., has to do with the common 
education necessary for a plain everyday Georgia boy or 
girl. What the rank and file of youngsters from the 
country need, they say, is enough schooling to enable 
them to get a living in the world. That is precisely 
what I am claiming for the new knowledge about elec- 
tricity and the other forces of nature, that it is necessary 
in this new time to enable our young people to make 
their way in the world. 

What, for instance, has the new knowledge about elec- 
tricity taught us? It has shown us how to 

"Lift, lower, warp and tow, ^'' ^ ' ' ' '' "^ ' ' "i 

Drain, plow, reap and mow, 

24 1 



Pump, bore, and irrigate, 

Dredge, dig, and excavate, 

Pull, push, draw and drive, 

Split, plane, saw and rive, 

Carry, scatter, collect and bring. 

Blow, puff, halt and spring, 

Break, condense, open and shut. 

Pick, drill, hammer and cut, 

Shove, wash, mix and grind, -- , 

Crush, sift, bolt and bind, *; 

Thresh, winnow, punch and knead. 

Mold, stamp, press and feed. 

Rake, scrape, bore and shave. 

Run on land, ride on wave, - - 

Mortice, forge, roll and rasp, 

Polish, rivet, file and clasp. 

Brush, propel, card and spin. 
Put out fire, and paper pins, 
Weave, wind, twist an throw. 
Stand, lie, come and go. 
Slit, turn, shear and "hew. 
Coin and print what's new." 

Everyone whose head is not completely filled with 
wooden pegs instead of brains is compelled to recognize 
that knowledge of a force capable of being converted 
into every form of work man is called to do, is certainly 
practical enough. 

XVII. 

Nevada is paying $11.89 P®^ capita for public educa- 
tion. The State of Washington is paying $10.00 per capi- 
ta; and poor old Mormon ridden Utah is paying $8.00 

25 



per capita. Georgia, the Empire State of the South, is 
paying $1.49. Greorgia is far ric'her in natural resources 
than any of these States. Is it not plain that boys trained 
in $11.89 schools will get a superior education to those 
trained in $1.49 schools. Boys born in a poor State, nat- 
urally, but educated in schools rich in equipment and 
efficiency, will seek the State rich in natural resources 
to make the best use of their superior education. Just 
as sure as nig'ht follows day, children with a $1.49 edu- 
cation cannot successfully contend with those getting an 
$11.80 education. So the people of Georgia had just as 
will recognize the truth that they must either pay more 
for public education, or else get ready to turn over the 
soil, mines, and rivers and mountains of this dear old com- 
monwealth to foreigners. We resent nearly fifty years 
after the civil war is over the thought of 'having been 
forced to surrender to Federal soldiers ; but we can stand 
that, because in bravery and ability to fight, our Southern 
men were the equals of any who ever bore arms. But an 
army is getting ready to come South now, far more to 
be dreaded than the one that invaded the country in 
1861. It is an army of experts drilled in Northern school- 
houses along all lines of practical knowledge. They are 
coming to take t'he lands from our children, and they 
are coming to take this region of sunshine and flowers 
from the rising generation. What sort of comfort can 
we find for ourselves when the second surrender is made 
of the very homes of our fathers to invaders from the 
Northern and Western States. Our fathers could say in 
'65, we are as brave as the soldiers to wliom we surren- 
der; but our children cannot say, when they surrender 
to superior mental training, that they are the equals of 
those to whom they surrender. If they were, they 
could keep their lands and property. The prosperity 
and unparalleled wealth of the South of to-morrow are 

26 



certain, but what ought to make every Southerner weep is 
the thought, that under our present educational equip- 
ment, our children will not be the directors and the own- 
ers of this coming prosperity and wealth. It will be in 
the hands of the men who wore the blue and conquered 
our fathers in the war between the North and the South. 
This will be enough to cause Robert E. Lee, Jefferson 
Davis, Robert Toombs, William L. Yancey and the rest 
to turn over in their graves. The only chance on earth 
our children have of owning the property of this State 
thirty years from now is through the work of a complete- 
ly equipped common school ; and yet, the common school 
in Georgia to-day is so absolutely poverty-stricken, so 
run-down at the heel, that young men of force cannot be 
induced to work in it any longer than is barely necessary 
to make the means to get out of it into the law or some 
other calling. A good live convict in Georgia was accus- 
tomed to receive more for his work than a teacRer in one 
of our country schools. The average pay of a school 
teacher is $35.00. The whole thing is not only discredi- 
table, it is a black and burning disgrace. It would not 
be so bad if the grown people among us who permit this 
condition of things had to take all the consequences into 
their own lives. The heart-breaking truth about the aw- 
ful outrage is, that the fearful, poverty-insuring, soul- 
starving consequences will come to the sweet, innocent 
boys and girls now growing up in the State. 

XVIII.I 

God never made any finer, better brain stuff than He 
stores in the heads of Southern children. All they need 
to become leaders in the world's affairs is training. A 
Southern boy, Robert S. Brookings, began at the bot- 
tom, in the Cupples Woodenware Co., of St. Lx)uis, thir- 
ty-five years ago. Through his influence, and that of 



27 



his partner, Mr. Cupples, Washington University has 
been practically refounded, and now stands with an en- 
dowment for its various schools of nearly $15,000,000. A 
Southern Georgia boy, Mr. Robert Adamson, is to-day 
one of the most influential forces in the political life 
of New York. A little Atlanta boy, Forrest Greene, 
I knew in Trinity Sunday School twenty-five years ago, 
is to-day the owner of twelve acres of machinery known 
as the Georgia Car and Foundry Company. H'e buys 
from the Pennsylvania Railway Co. and from the New 
York Central Railroad as many as one hundred engines 
at a time, remodels them, and repairs them, and then 
sells them for use on new Southern roads. He buiMs 
passenger coaches, sends them by rail to New York, 
and then by steamer to different parts of South America, 
to be used on the railway lines there. George Foster 
Peabody, another Southern boy, and a Georgian, is one 
of the most distinguished philanthropists and successful 
business men in this country. Walter H. Page, another 
Southern boy, is the Editor of the World's Work, one of 
the most influential journals of modern times. All these 
men owe what they "have become to training received 
in the common school. Take from them their common 
school education, and you take Washington University 
out of St. Louis. You take a distinguished director of 
political life out of New York. You take one of the best 
friends the South has in this country out of the lists of 
philanthropists. And you take the Georgia Car and 
Foundry Company out of Atlanta. Take the school in 
which he was taught from Tennyson, and you take "In 
Memoriam" out of literature. Take education from the 
minds of Edison and Graham Bell, and you take electric 
light from our streets and the telephone from our homes. 
Throw the arms of a completely equipped common school 
aorund the children of to-day, and you embrace the larger, 



?8 



ric'her life of to-morrow. Educate the minds of the boys 
and girls, and you put heart, and hope, and inspiration 
into coming movements. A little Georgia boy, Robert 
Loveman, I knew in Dalton twenty-eight years ago had 
his eyes and heart opened in the common school, and 
afterwards, he sang a song that has been heard all round 
the world. In the sdhool he learned the secret of paint- 
ing all things outside of him in the colors of his own 
soul. In the midst of the dark downpour from the 
clouds, he could say, 

■'It isn't raining rain to me, 

It's raining daffodils, 

In every dimpled drop, I see. 

Wild flowers on the hills. 

The clouds of grey engulf the day, 

And overwhelm the town. 

It isn't raining rain to me. 

It's raining roses down. 

It isn't raining rain to me. 
But fields of clover bloom. 
Where every buccaneering bee. 
May find a bed and room. 
A health unto the happy, 
A fig to him who frets, 
It isn't raining rain to me. 
It's raining violets." 

A little red headed Georgia boy discovered in the com- 
mon school of Eatonton how to entertain himself by 
thinking. When Tennyson read his first book, "Uncle 
Remus," he remarked, "Here at last is something live 
and kicking from America." Special emphasis in this 
address has been placed on the common school as neces- 

29 



sary to help our children make their way in the world, 
but in reality the great value of public education is 
that it gives to the young the possession of themselves 
as menal and spiritual beings. To know how to succeed 
in the practical affairs to life is well» but to know how to 
make first class men and women of themselves is infin- 
itely better. The outer commercial forms in whidi man 
expresses himself pass away. Nothing lasts except the 
moral and spiritual wealth he manages in the struggle 
for existence to store in his soul. All past history teaches 
us that mere material gain unaccompanied by moral and 
spiritual worth has no lasting value. 

Edwin Markham has well said : 

"Voices are crying from the ruins of Tyre, 
From Karnack and the stones of Babylon, 
Saying we raised our pillars on self desire, 
And so perished from the large gaze of the sun. 

A grandeur came down from the Pyramids, 
A glory come on Greece, a light on Rome, 
But in them all tlie ancient traitor hid. 
And so they perished like momentary foam. 

There was no substance in their soaring hopes, 
The voice of Thebes is but a desert cry, 
A spider bars the way with filmy ropes. 
Where once the fleet of Cartilage thundered by. 

A bittern cries where once Queen Dido laughed, 
A thistle nods where once the forum roared, 
A lizard lifts and listens on a shaft 
Where once of old the Coliseum poured. 



30 



It is a vision waiting and aware, 
And you must bring it down, O men of worth 
Bring down the republic from the air, 
And give it habitation on the earth." 

The great thing about education is after all that it calls 
into action the powers of the soul — "enables it to take to 
itself aromas, sounds and sights, beliefs and hopes; find 
star tracks through the night and miracles in weeds." 



U 



